Friday, February 21, 2014

If you’re not a liberal at
twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no
brain.

This famous saying is attributed to Winston Churchill (although it may predate
him).

I saw this quoted recently on an
online forum, in a discussion about changing one’s mind. I could only think of a
few examples of major issues on which I have changed my mind. But there were a
lot of examples in which I had come to appreciate the nuances of an argument
and realized that my earlier position had been one-dimensional.

This realization inspired my
version of the 20/40 aphorism:

At 20 I believed in simplistic
answers and held firm convictions, at 40 I understood nuance and was more
willing to listen to multiple sides of any position.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

For the last few decades, and
particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Karl Marx was out of
fashion. You couldn’t mention him without people sneering at how out of touch
you were. This was the era of triumphalism about capitalism’s victory over
communism marked by the publication of The End of History.

I knew this was just temporary,
because so much of the prejudice was based on a misunderstanding of what Marx
had written. Now that we can’t seem to recover from the Great Recession, and
more and more people are aware of increasing income inequality in the U.S.,
things are changing.

Robert Heilbroner, in his
classic book on economics The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great
Economic Thinkers (1953), writes that Marx’s analysis of capitalism was
superb and accurately forecast many things that have since emerged but were not
obvious in his day: “But for all its shortcomings—and it is far from
infallible, as we shall see—the Marxist model of how capitalism worked was
extraordinarily prophetic.”

Here’s a quick summary of five of
Marx’s predictions that have come true:

1. Capitalism’s chaotic nature;
illustrated by the regular cycles of boom and bust.

2. Capitalism creates imaginary appetites to
artificially inflate spending.The
article illustrates this with the iPhone—do we
really need a new one every year?

3. Globalization.
Obvious.

4. Monopoly—WalMart,
Google, Microsoft, Amazon…

5. Low
wages mean big profits.

Heilbroner discussed Marx’s
analysis of these issues, including the last point of the value of a laborer:

[T]he laborer, like the capitalist, sells his product for
exactly what it is worth—for its value. And its value, like the value of
everything else that is sold, is the amount of labor that goes into it—in this
case, the amount of labor it takes to ‘make’ labor-power. In other words, a
laborer’s salable energies are worth the amount of socially necessary labor it
takes to keep that laborer alive. [Economists Adam] Smith and [David] Ricardo
would have agreed entirely: the true value of a workman is the wage he needs in
order to exist. It is his subsistence wage.

In other words, capitalism’s
measure of the correct wage to pay a worker is that which is just enough to
keep him/her alive.

Heilbroner concludes:

In the end the figure who must
be proven wrong is Marx the Economist, Marx the finicky scholar who laboriously
sought to prove, through the welter of surface distractions, that the essence
of capitalism is self-destruction.
The answer to Marx lies not so much in pointing out the injustices of communism
as in demonstrating that in a social atmosphere of which Marx never dreamed,
capitalism can continue to evolve and to adapt its institutions to the
never-satisfied demands of social justice.

We could add a sixth point to
the list above: unsustainability. Capitalism needs constant growth in order to
work; it is not a sustainable system. This is why Marx said it would
self-destruct.

As just one example, how much
evidence will need to accumulate that global climate change is happening before
we question the right of capitalists to keep digging up more carbon-based fuel?Marx predicted that the system of
capitalism would self-destruct; it’s getting to the point where we need to
start worrying whether it will take the human race with it.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Is language required for human
consciousness, by which I mean self-awareness?

Before my teacher came to me, I
did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope
to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness.

With these words Helen Keller
began an essay in her book entitled The
World I Live In (Essay 11: “Before the Soul Dawn”). She continues,

I did not know that I knew
aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I
was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had
a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led
those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this,
not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It
enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of
thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall
tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel
that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without
past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy
or faith.

Ms. Keller describes that famous
moment when she realized that the finger-movements in her hand meant “water” in
this way:

That word startled my soul, and
it awoke, full of the spirit of the morning, full of joyous, exultant song.
Until that day my mind had been like a darkened chamber, waiting for words to
enter and light the lamp, which is thought.

After reading this book of
essays I got Ms. Keller’s autobiography, The
Story of My Life. Here she gives a more thorough account of that auspicious
day. Ms. Sullivan, her teacher, had been with her for several weeks at this
point, and taught her lots of words, but she had no comprehension that this was
anything more than a game. One morning the two were spelling “doll” while
holding an actual doll. Ms. Keller got exasperated and threw the doll on the
floor, breaking it.

Neither sorrow nor regret
followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark
world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness.

The two went outside and ended
up at the well-house where the profound moment happened; when the understanding
that words have meanings swept through Ms. Keller’s consciousness. As they went
back into the house,

I remembered the doll I had
broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to
put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had
done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.

I was very moved by this
passage. The first experience Ms. Keller had after her breakthrough, other than
the desire to learn as much as possible, was the complex human emotion of
remorse. Somehow the use of language connected her in a profound way to the
people and larger world around her. Is language the key to what makes us human?

I had never read these books
before, and I recommend them to everyone as a way to gain a deeper appreciation
of what it is to be human. The first impression you get is of the beautiful
soul that inhabited the body of Helen Keller.

Second, you recognize that the
human spirit can overcome all obstacles. What astounded me was her ability to
visualize! She makes it clear that there is a physical world of vision, and a
mental world of vision, and I bet that when you read her rhapsodies you’ll
think as I did that the world of the mind is more beautiful and full than that
of the physical. Through a lot of The
World I Live In she is defensive about her ability to use words like “I
see,” (clearly she was criticized for using such words), but reading her essays
it is clear that she did see, and
deeply.

About Me

I'm a philosopher, writer, videographer, and entrepreneur. In 2013 I've released a new book, "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity." I'm the co-author with my husband Arthur Hancock of "The Game of God: Recovering Your True Identity.